The increased reliance on electronic messaging, such as voice mail, email, instant messaging, text messaging, and numeric pages, among others, has resulted in a great increase in the number of electronic messages a user sends and receives daily. Many of these messages are commonly requests for information, or requests for initiating a meeting between the sending and receiving parties. Hence, a major problem is that a user can become inundated with messages, many of which may be handled with relative ease by a simple response returning the desired information or confirming presence at a meeting. However, time spent managing such messages adversely impacts the productivity of businesses and adds to the already high stress levels of employees in the business environment. Accordingly, it would be beneficial to have a method and system which helps reduce the amount of incoming messages to a user.
In enterprise communication networks, integrated messaging systems that combine voice mail and e-mail functions in an integrated application are available. Generally, such systems, such as the Avaya™ Unified Communications Center, allow a user to access their various mailboxes through a single device, such as a telephone or a personal computer. In connection with such devices, the ability to pass messages to and from voice mail mailboxes and data files using packet data transmission techniques has been developed. For example, data can be transferred to and from voice mail mailboxes over conventional computer networks. Such systems commonly contain a directory of all users, which can be used to select a user to contact by, for example, telephone or email. The directory of users generally has a listing of all users, from which a particular user may be selected to access additional information about that particular user. While such a system provides a useful tool for communications in an enterprise, information provided therein remains static, and generally is limited to contact information. Accordingly, such a directory does little to provide specific information regarding particular users, and help reduce the number of electronic messages received by a user.
In other Web applications, Web users (Party A or the caller) can visit another user's (Party B or the called party) home page, but they do not know the whereabouts of the called party. The caller is typically limited to seeing static/dynamic (non-realtime) Web content published by the called party. Portal players, such as Yahoo, do provide a way to personalize syndicated content (such as stocks, weather, news, etc.) and limited collaboration (such as email and chat) for a portal. Portal players, however, do not provide an automated personalized assistant.
Although automated personal assistants are known, they are speech-based personal assistants and are limited to circuit-switched networks, such as the Public Switched Telephone Network. For example, the Avaya Advanced Speech Access Application™ provides a speech-based personal assistant that allows a subscriber using speech commands remotely to access and manage electronic or voice mail messages, to make phone calls or set up and conduct conference calls, to manage to do lists and calendar functions, and to configure sophisticated contact notification and forwarding features for contacts by pre-selected people. Speech-based personal assistants, however, are not suitable for packet-switched networks and are therefore generally limited in versatility and functionality.